Jaroslav Novotný

“I started with the Egyptology Institute. It was just before my docent degree in inorganics. I liked teaching at university, but once every year I was confronted with the horror of the entrance exams. An encounter with superb, capable people that I would accept at an instance, but most of them didn’t pass. I was really gnawed up by it, I couldn’t take it. So when Zbyněk Žába came looking for someone with a penchant for foreign language and travelling, I became the first employee of the Czechoslovak Egyptology Institute. That very moment I abandoned my promising career and had myself employed as a secretary, chief of transportation, spokesman, restorer, document-maker, and photographer. All in one bundle. Žába and I took a six-o-three [Tatra 603 - trans.] and zoomed off through Germany and France to Marseille and then through Tunisia to Egypt, where there was a big UNESCO project underway to save Nubian monuments. The Egyptology Institute was established. They paid us in crowns, and we were as happy as horses to be outside. And that it all worked out like that, it was actually my new career.”

“A bulletin came saying they were looking for volunteers to the Technische Nothilfe, for assignment to bombed-up cities. The volunteer is to freed from his studies, and this contract would enable him to pass exams once a year. So I, the unfulfilled rebel, let myself get drafted. And that started a whole new world for me. I could already speak German, but it wasn’t easy. We lived in a small settlement called Steele, now it’s on the outskirts of Essen. In the morning we would set out to wherever they needed us. It was demolishing work more than rescuing. It was better to knock the ruins down so they wouldn’t collapse on someone. They collapsed on me once. They dug me out of the rubble, put me on a stretcher, took me to hospital; I recovered there still wrapped up in a lady’s winter coat that some German woman had draped over me. I witnessed the liberation by the English army in hospital – it was there region. I call it ‘crossroads’ – when you’re down in the dumps, you suddenly find purpose again. You don’t know where to go next, and suddenly a solution presents itself. There was an English unit there, which was devoted to de-Nazification, so interrogating Germans, and I interpreted for them. I learnt proper English as well. What luck! I wasn’t in a rush to get home because I was living it out in full, after the war I wore a battledress. What more could I want! It took me a year to get home. I sauntered through Germany, interpreting – for Poles, a bit for Russians, certainly for Slovaks, Czechs, Moravians. The Ruhr Valley was full of ‘Gastarbeiters’, people who had been assigned to labour there, who needed to get home somehow. So we did that.”